Posted by On April 23, 2006 in Medicine Hat, Canada, Marc and Debra Richardson and their 8-year-old son Jacob were found dead. The murders were planned and committed by the couple’s 12-year-old daughter, whose name was protected by youth justice law, and her 23-year-old boyfriend, Jeremy Steinke. She, the youngest person convicted of multiple first-degree murder in Canada, served 10 years. He is serving three life sentences.
In April 2006 three members of the Richardson family in Canada were murdered. The murders were planned and committed by the 12-year-old daughter and her 23-year-old boyfriend, Jeremy Steinke. In this article, as required by Canadian youth law, I will only call her “the daughter”.
The Richardson family murders
The Richardsons had moved to Medicine Hat, Alberta, in 2005, after difficult years. Marc and Debra were former drug addicts who had got clean and rebuilt their lives, and thanks to a promotion for Marc they had managed to buy a house.
At one in the afternoon on April 23, 2006 a little friend of Jacob’s, who had come over to play, found the bodies and ran to tell his mother, who called the police. In the basement were Marc, 42, and Debra, 48, killed with numerous stab wounds. Upstairs was the body of their 8-year-old son, Jacob. Of their 12-year-old daughter, however, there was no trace.
At first police feared the girl had also been killed, but the next day she was found in Leader, Saskatchewan, about 130 kilometers from home, with her 23-year-old boyfriend, Jeremy Allan Steinke. In her school locker investigators had found a drawing showing her family being killed.
Both were arrested and charged with murder. On May 3 Kacy Lancaster, a 19-year-old friend of Jeremy’s, was also arrested for driving them away in her pickup and disposing of evidence.
The motive
The Richardsons’ daughter was a model student, with excellent grades and many friends. In 2005, however, she started hanging out with a group of older goth kids at the local mall and her behavior changed. On social media she lied about her age and listed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer among her “heroes”.
In January 2006 she met Jeremy Steinke, who was 23. Her parents, worried about the age gap, forbade her to see him, but she kept meeting him in secret. An adult man in a relationship with a twelve-year-old girl is, in itself, serious abuse.
When her parents caught her with him at a concert, they grounded her and took away her electronics. According to her, that was when she began fantasizing about getting rid of them. Her relationship with her little brother had also worsened, and Jacob had told a family friend he was afraid of his sister.
Jeremy’s friends said he claimed to be a 300-year-old werewolf, that he liked the taste of blood and wore a small vial of blood around his neck. Both had profiles on VampireFreaks, a goth subculture site, and at first it was thought they had met there. In fact they had met at the mall, introduced by a friend of the girl’s.
A few hours before the murders Jeremy had watched the film “Natural Born Killers”, the story of two lovers who become killers, with some friends, and told them he and his girlfriend would do something similar.
Legal consequences
The girl’s name was not made public because she was a minor. Also because of her age, Canadian law did not allow her to be tried as an adult and the maximum possible sentence was 10 years.
On July 9, 2007, by then aged 13, she was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. She is the youngest person ever convicted of multiple murder in Canada. On November 8, 2007 she received the maximum sentence: ten years.
After credit for time already spent in custody, the sentence included four years in a psychiatric institution and four and a half years under conditional supervision. While in detention Jeremy wrote her love letters and in one he asked her to marry him, and she accepted.
Jeremy was tried in November 2008 and on December 15 sentenced to three life terms, one for each victim, with parole eligibility after 25 years. In prison he legally changed his name to Jackson May, in honor of his mother, who died in 2016. The accessory charge against Kacy Lancaster was dropped and she pleaded guilty to a lesser offense.
The girl left the psychiatric hospital in the fall of 2011 and began attending university in Calgary. In October 2012 it was reported that her rehabilitation was going well and that her remorse, according to experts, was genuine. On May 6, 2016 her sentence was completed for good and, under Canadian law, her criminal record was to be expunged in 2021.
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